Surveillance Societies

Usually, I watch Taiwanese news with a kind of horrified curiosity. They level of celebrity bullshit is a bit unbelievable. When I first got here, I tried seeing if there was a difference in the type of news — you know, one show is more NBC Nightly News and one is Extra! — but I gave that up pretty quickly. So there is a news-y type things — politicians meeting or other noteworthy stories — with celebrity bits and shame stories, also with some youtube clips or “look at this crazy apricot that looks just like a duck” type stories as well. 

First, for the celebrity bit I’ll give some examples of what this is like. There was press conference and a red carpet-esque photo shoot at a wedding reception: this story got about 2 minutes coverage. There is a segment where celebrity photos are dissected by a tv hostess who uses certain graphics — a heart, a broken-heart etc. — to draw on the photo as if she were a weather-woman explaining where the cold front was coming from. There are tons and tons of interviews. I was at a bus stop today and there was a guy — cameraman man in show — who interviewed about four people in the seven minutes I waited for the bus. One time, they showed the concert footage of this Taiwanese pop star who put on this elaborate show. Right after the concert footage, their was an interview with the star in full costume/make-up right in front of the stage in this huge auditorium, fifteen different microphones shoved in front of her mouth: It was as if the whole performance had been an introduction to the interview.

But now, for what I really want to talk about: The shame stories may be even more unbelievable. I recently started meeting with another language exchange partner and we met at my favorite breakfast which usually is the one place where I will glance at the news on tv. It was great because she translated/explained to me what these stories were about. There was footage of some overly-drunk guy, handcuffed and kind of just acting like a baby. They had coverage from his arrest and his release — where his relative walked him out, covering his face with a sweatshirt. After that, there were two stories of tenants or landowners not paying the rent — why this is interesting I don’t know. One of the stories took place in a court house and the subject of the clip was trying to cover up the camera but the cameraman used his hand to kind of aggressively push her hand away so he could get her face on film. 

 The worst story, in my opinion, however, was a cell-phone video of two women eating on the MRT (Taipei’s very nice subway system). I guess it’s “forbidden” (as my language exchange partner fittingly translated it for me). Here’s the “story”: 

Chicken-munchers caught

Kaohsiung’s mass rapid transit system reported earlier this week that officials had tracked down two students who violated a prohibition on eating and drinking on the system. Police said the two senior high school commuters were eating fried chicken on one of the trains, filling the carriage with the odor of the greasy treat. The culprits were identified with the help of a local news cable station and video footage recorded by another passenger who filed a complaint. One of the students said that he did not know eating and drinking on the MRT is not permitted, while the other said that although he was fully aware of the rule, he was hungry. The fines for eating or drinking on the MRT range between NT$1,500 and NT$7,500. A total of 7,143 commuters were warned and 112 tickets were issued between January and August this year on the system.

My language exchange partner said this is a frequent occurrence. People will catch other people breaking laws/rules and will take cell-phone camera footage of it. She said that people will then send it to a tv news station and other people will then use the internet to identify the “culprits.” What was unclear was why people would send it to the tv station and not some other authorities, or the ratio of sending evidence to one or the other. I talked about it with my Taiwanese co-worker and he said that there’s a sever lack of trust in the police or authorities in general. I’m not sure if I exactly believe that. And, as the article shows, this “punishment by tv news” isn’t done with every case — so the decision to put one story on the news and not the other is more arbitrary than exacting. 

But it’s still a little crazy. I don’t think I really need to explain why, as a Westerner, this makes my skin crawl a bit.

China’s surveillance tactics — actual security cameras and whatnot — have been commented on quite a bit (I can’t find the link to the big article Naomi Klein [yes, that link is a new yorker profile] wrote about it in Rolling Stone, but here is an interview with her about the article). Fortunately, I haven’t observed the same practices here in Taiwan. But I was disenheartened to see some of the same cultural mindset on display here.

I’ve never been to China — only read about it — but I had/have this preconception/conception that Taiwan is a more Westernized version of China. I kind of interpreted this as Taiwan being like China with a lot of the bullshit cut out. For instance, you don’t have to worry about censorship here or deal, a really fierce Greater China nationalism or a skeptical attitude towards the West. But this habit of public shaming definitely comes from greater Chinese culture.

To give some examples of this: China, just this year, banned “shame parades” of prostitutes. Around Location 3822, in his awesome new book, Country Road, Peter Hessler talks the level of criticism and shame Chinese schoolchildren have to deal with. He also writes how, in each class, students are assigned roles such as Politeness Monitor, Class Monitor, Homework Monitor and Hygiene Monitor. He writes,

“The class did everything together, and the emphasis was always on their collective identity. No divisions were made with regard to ability level; there wasn’t such a thing as a reading group or a math group. If a child excelled, he learned to wait; if he lagged, he dealt with shame. Poor performances were public and anybody who misbehaved was forced to stand in front class, where other kids helped the teacher point out shortcomings. Report cards always included a negative comment from some randomly selected peer.”

It’s hard not to see this anecdote about the tv show as being part of the same vein. I understand that shame plays a significant role in both group cohesion and conduct: it allows the group to create an identity in contrast to a “bad” example and thereby reinforces the “good” behavior of the group. It’s odd to wonder about a possible correlation between the presence of shame and the stability of a community — though I know nothing would be this simple. 

Taiwan is an incredibly stable place. When I say stable, I mean both that it functions relatively well and lacks many problems — crime, poverty — that plague many places around the world. It’s not just a lack of these problems, however. Many people here seem to be very content and happy with where/who/what they are. Most people I’ve talked to don’t have any real desire to live outside and most know what they want in life and either have that or on This also means that this place isn’t all that dynamic, or the people all that ambitious. 

Of course, America loves its slice of shame every now and again. But if someone secretly took a video of some strangers breaking a harmless rule and then, out of their own volition, sent it to a tv station to make an example out of these people*… well, I think Americans would look down more on their tattler than the wrongdoers. (I remember getting in trouble for inconsequential tattling in school when I was young, but my classes here are filled with little tattlers.)  I think that shows a higher prioritization of the individual and the individual’s privacy. I think it does really come down to differing balances of communitarianism vs. individualism. But that’s all the insight I can muster on this subject for now…

* Again, this might not exactly been the case. The person recording the video might have sent this to the transit authorities or something else — I’m not positive how the tv station got a hold of the video.